Sunday, September 20, 2015

They have generously donated these 5 books to our Challenge quilters! Isn't this just a picture of scrappy heaven?

So, a little about Martingale:

Celebrating 36 successful years in business, Martingale is an industry-leading publisher of quilt, knit, crochet, and craft books by top authors. Since our founding in 1976 by Dan and Nancy J. Martin, we've sold more than 21 million books worldwide.
For the first 20 years, our focus was entirely on quilting, and we were known as That Patchwork Place®. In 1996, we broadened our scope to include knitting, crochet, and other crafts. To reflect this broadened emphasis, we adopted the name Martingale & Company. Over the years, the name Martingale has become synonymous with outstanding craft books, so in 2012 we simplified our name to Martingale. We also celebrated our successful brand by updating our logos. That Patchwork Place remains an imprint of Martingale.
To ensure the continuation of their successful business, the Martins chose to sell the company to their employees. In 2007, Martingale became 100% employee-owned. Thriving under the leadership of Jennifer Keltner, who took the helm as Publisher and Chief Visionary Officer in April 2014, Martingale is staffed with enthusiastic people dedicated to their crafts and to the corporate mission: providing quality products and service to inspire creativity. (On the personal side, 80% of staff members quilt, sew, or craft during off-work hours.)

Martingale is very helpful to your local quilt shop too. They keep in constant contact with us on new releases and quilting trends. Working with their authors, they allow shops to borrow quilts for a short time from the author & host trunk shows.

This summer we hosted 3 month-long trunk shows of Vintage Vibe and were able to show our customers 12 of the projects from this fantastic book by Amber Johnson. {Amber is our October Scrap Quilt Challenge Featured Designer, by the way. You'll want to make sure to pop back over on October 1st for her scrap block tute!}

Big Thank YOU to Martingale for supporting the craft industry for nearly 4 decades by inspiring us all to find our creative outlet. We also thank them for supporting the 5th Scrap Quilt Challenge!

Thursday, September 17, 2015

Quilters Dream Batting is a family owned and operated business since 1995. From the very beginning, they have been committed to quality, service, and innovation, and all Quilters Dream Batting products are made with pride in the USA.

They say it best on their website & I have to agree with everything this says....

We use the finest fibers available and state of the art manufacturing to bring our customers batting of unsurpassed quality and consistency. Quilters Dream Batting uses the softest, silkiest high-quality fibers so that your quilt will stay soft, wonderfully drapeable, and will resist shrinkage. With higher quality fiber and processing, greater stitching distances are made possible for wonderful freedom of design. Each batting is hand cut and hand inspected to insure unsurpassed quality. We carry a variety of lofts, fibers, colors, and sizes to meet all your quilting needs.

With a commitment to excellence and quality, the goal at Quilters Dream Batting has always been to exceed our customers expectations in every way. We believe that quality batting affects the ease of quilting and is essential to quilts' longevity, drape and beauty. Batting can define and enhances the character and feel of a quilt as well as adding stability, volume, warmth and drape.

Quilters Dream Batting is honored to be a part of the beauty, art and love that is a handmade quilt.

In addition to being a great batting, as a family-run business, they understand that with families come heartaches. For years Quilters Dream Batting has spearheaded the Hopes & Dreams for ALS Quilt Challenge. Read more about Hopes & Dreams here: http://hopesanddreams.quiltersdreambatting.com/.

This year they have added a new batting, PINK, which is a pink 80/20 cotton/poly batting . 10% of Dream Pink sales are donated to Metastatic Breast Cancer research.Quilter's Dream is pretty active on Instagram & other social networks. Find all the links on the company's home page: http://quiltersdreambatting.com/Generous as ever, Quilters Dream has donated all these batting packages. Many Scrap Quilt Challenge quilters are going to be VERY happy!

Tuesday, September 15, 2015

Kim & I hope you have enjoyed your trip through your scrap bins and our tutorials. Today's our last block & our big reveal! Don't miss the details at the end for the giveaway!Remember, Kim from Persimon Dreams & I are each posting a tutorial today! Kim is going to blow your mind today with her design, so you gotta go pop over & check it out: http://persimondreams.blogspot.com/2015/09/regent-ropeblock-3dreaming-in-fabric.htmlContinuing my fun with pinwheels, my third block will combine to make up our top & bottom border. These blocks will give your quilt a secondary design when we make them in 2 different colors. Onward!We are making a 6" finished block. In my final reveal, we will use 2 colorways of this block, yellow and red. We'll need 8 yellow and 10 red blocks in my final design (see below). We'll call this one...

Kim & I originally agreed on an unsashed setting, but adding sashing to my design gave it a new look I really liked. It helps it gel a bit more too. So, I have decided to give you a few options for layout. All 3 layouts use 8 blocks of my Block 1 and 8 blocks of my Block 2. Block 3, above will require a total of 16 blocks for the unsashed option and 18 blocks for the sashed.

First let's look at the unsashed versions. Turning Block 1 so we have a pink star in the middle:

I think the unsashed versions look better with all yellow Block 3's.

You will need 16 Block 3's for the unsashed version

Here's the unsashed with Block 1 turned to form a red star in the middle:

Do you love the spools that form in the corners around the 4 center star blocks?

Sashed Option

In the unsashed versions, you'll see that the image on the right has the block numbers overlaid so it's easy to see where each block is placed.Same layout as the red-star-center unsashed version above, just with sashing plus the 2 colorways of Block #3. Remember from above, that we'll use 8 yellow Block #3's & 10 red Block #3's.

If you choose the sashed version, we need to cut those sashing strips! I find that using the same fabric for all your sashing will calm the overall scrappiness a bit . I used backing scraps and was able to still work out of the stash.

All strips are 2.5" wide.

Red:

(4) 30.5"

(24) 12.5"

(9) 2.5"

Yellow:

(4) 12.5"

(4) 20.5"

Let's STITCH!

I am going to explain the sashed version's construction. I think you can deduce the other 2 from the longer explanation (i.e., leave out the sashing.)

And here is my finished Dreaming in Fabric quilt. I even used Frankenbatting (scraps of batting fused with HPB to make a bigger piece of batting {here's a blog post about it})

There are print buttons at the end of the post for easy post printing & even editing what you print. For example, if you don't need the pictures or all the text, this option will let you save paper & ink! Next week, I will make a consolidated pdf of all 3 tutorials & have that on our Free Patterns page (here).

Link up your blocks here or onKim's post. They will show on both blogs, so you only need to link up once!

Don't forget...on November 15th, we will host a linky party for finished tops or quilts. Fabrics N Quilts will award a $25.00 gift certificate to one of these linky quilters, at random. The quilt can be any combination of the Dreaming In Fabric blocks. Kim & I can't wait to see what you create!

Sunday, September 13, 2015

Quilting Treasures is an Employee-Owned company that designs and produces high quality fabrics exclusively to the Independent market. The company’s history dates back to 1807! I hear that we will soon see some reproductions of the earliest designs made by the company. Talk about authentic!

QT has a great in-house design team working on fabric lines, but also partners with terrific artists to bring their art to textiles. You can see bios of their team here http://www.quiltingtreasures.com/meetourdesigners/. In addition, they also work with brands, like Peanuts, Case, Elf on the Shelf & a ton more; see them here: http://www.quiltingtreasures.com/licensedbrands/. With a treasure chest of designs like that, you know they have something to suit a huge variety of tastes and quilty needs.

Quilting Treasures also understands community responsibility and through its charitable foundation has donated approximately $8 million to various non-profit organizations. We do love a company that gives back, don't we?!

Though part of the larger Cranston Fabric company, Quilting Treasures is a brand of its own. The fabrics are a quality unique within the larger company and are available only in independent quilt shops and fabric stores.

I am personally honored to be a pattern designer for QT. They are a superb team to work with and I get excited to see each new line that comes my way for patterns. You can find my latest patterns I designed for Quilting Treasures on my Free Patterns page with a link that will take you straight to the pattern on the QT site. Look for my next pattern this fall with the Shalimar collection. {of course, I'll have kits for you!}

Quilting Treasures has generously donated a lap quilt kit of my design for the Bloom fabric line. Bloom was designed by Amylee Weeks and features butterflies & a cute florals as well as modern geometric designs. The color palette draws you in. Amylee is a Christian artist and her designs reflect her faith. We are out of these kits in the shop, so this Scrap Quilt Challenge prize will be extra special.

{Since this prize is of a Christian theme, we understand it may not be suitable for every quilter. If you are selected the winner and prefer a swap, we will gladly reward you with an alternate prize.}

Tuesday, September 8, 2015

Lavender Lime is a pattern design company located in Tennessee and I am proud to say I know this designer. Kathy Skomp has a great eye for design and better yet, a way to make stunning quilts that are simple to create. Her patterns are extremely easy to follow and always accurate due to her dedication to thorough testing!

Fabrics N Quilts will be offering her new Block of the Month pattern, For Keeps, as our 2016 BOM.

Our colors will be very different than the pattern cover and we are excitedly collecting fabrics. Can't wait to see it all come together. We do our big reveal on Black Friday in the shop, so no peeking!

I have personally made other quilts from Lavender Lime patterns. My favorite was Tie the Knot. Can you believe this is a one block quilt!?

Saturday, September 5, 2015

Wilmington Prints started as a small division of MM Fab in 2005 and has since grown into a national and international supplier to the quilt and craft industry. They offer 100% cotton fabrics of the finest quality featuring unique fabric designs that showcase the talents of many artists, both well-known and “new”.

Wilmington has a wonderful and diverse selection of 108" quilt backings. We use them all the time & just quilted up a quilt this week with this one:

Another big plus with Wilmington Fabrics is a free project sheet idea with nearly every line of fabric they offer, even strips! At Fabrics N Quilts, we have these in the shop to get you inspired, and for our online customers, we always include a copy when you've ordered that line! You can also download these sheets anytime from the Projects page of their website.

Wilmington debuted their batiks in 2011. They have the always-availableBatik Basics-nice when you didn't get quite enough to finish, and new Jewels – 2 ½” strip packs. Speaking of strip packs, Wilmington does not pink their strips & they are bundled in 24 strips per packs. Both are a huge plus. You can see our selection of Gems & Jewels in our online shop & remember, free US shipping on every order.Wilmington has generously offered TWO of the batik strip packs for our Scrap Quilt Challenge winners! Lucky Ducks!

Tuesday, September 1, 2015

What I love most about this multi-national company is that they take interest in individuals and run their company like no one is a stranger. They are very social media active (all the links on their home page) & fast to share the beautiful projects made by hobby quilters and professionals alike. It's so refreshing to see this attention paid to "the everyday Josephine". A little bio on Aurifil can be found on their About page. I think that they never lost their roots of what it is to run a family business. So many corporations do, so let's all applaud Aurifil on that one!

Aurifil makes its cotton thread in 12, 28, 40 and 50 weight thread-all suitable for machine use -using the correct machine settings. They also offer large cones of polyester thread, intended for long arm use, monofilament, wool, and newly introduced cotton floss. The six strand floss is wound on wood spools {swoon}.

If you will be attending the AQS Show in Chattanooga, September 16-19, stop by & check out the threads, the different weights & stock up! We'll have a great special and good info too! You can find us in Booth #932. We're on the end of an aisle, so we should be easy to find-just a couple rows back from the quilt display.

Remember to tag the Aurifil creations you post online with the hashtag, #aurifil. You may just pick up some online love!
Thank you Elly & Alex for being such great partners to all the quilters and shops, big names or small. We appreciate you right back!